AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Café Lehmitz, his photographs of the regulars of a Hamburg bar (1967–1970), and the City Diary books
- Works in
- Black and white
- Camera
- A small Contax T3 compact in recent decades
- Also
- Studied with Christer Strömholm; Arles Photographer of the Year 2003; one of his Café Lehmitz pictures is the cover of Tom Waits's Rain Dogs
- Start with
- Café Lehmitz (Prestel, 2023)
Anders Petersen (born 1944) is a Swedish photographer who lives and works in Stockholm. He is best known for Café Lehmitz, his close and tender pictures of the regulars of a Hamburg bar, made between 1967 and 1970. For more than fifty years he has photographed people from very near, in black and white.
The story
One night in Hamburg, Anders Petersen walked into Café Lehmitz at exactly one o'clock. A friend, Gertrud, had promised to meet him there. He found a seat at the corner of a table and put his camera down. Some of the drinkers picked it up and began to photograph each other. Then it came back across the table. “They threw the camera to me, I kept it, and started to shoot,” he said. Gertrud arrived two hours late. “Look! It's working!” she told him.
The city was not new to him. He first came to the Reeperbahn in 1962, as an 18-year-old backpacker, and made a group of friends there. In 1967, after a year of study with the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, he went back to find them. “But people told me they were almost all dead,” he said. Many had been addicted to Preludin, a stimulant sold as a diet pill.
In the regulars of Café Lehmitz he saw his lost friends. The bar near the port was open almost around the clock. Sailors, dock workers, sex workers, pensioners and young drifters came there. “It was okay to be desperate, to be tender, to sit all alone or share the company of others,” he said. After a month he went home to Stockholm, but he kept coming back every few months until 1970.
That year he had his first exhibition, in the café itself. The bartender, Kurt, let him pin 350 prints to the wall. Anyone who found themselves in a picture could take it home. Within a few days almost all of them were gone. Only his self-portrait stayed, for nearly ten years.
Publishers were less welcoming. Seven of them turned the work down because they found it too unsavoury. So the book Café Lehmitz came out only in 1978, with Schirmer/Mosel in Munich. In 1985 Tom Waits used one of its pictures, Lily and Rose, on the cover of his album Rain Dogs.
On that first night, strangers had passed his camera around the table before he took a single frame. Decades later, the people still come first for him. “To me, it's encounters that matter,” he has said. “Pictures are much less important.”
The work
- 1944Born in Stockholm
- 1966Begins studying with Christer Strömholm in Stockholm
- 1967Starts photographing the regulars of Café Lehmitz in Hamburg
- 1970First exhibition: 350 prints pinned to the café wall
- 1978Café Lehmitz is published by Schirmer/Mosel
- 1984Fängelse (Prison), first book of his trilogy on closed institutions
- 2003Photographer of the Year at the Rencontres d'Arles
- 2012City Diary wins PhotoBook of the Year, Paris Photo–Aperture
- 2025The Left Shore, with Johan Renck, at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm
Lessons
Become part of the place. He was a regular at Café Lehmitz for about three years, not a visitor who came for one evening.
Give the pictures back. At his first exhibition, in the bar, anyone who recognised themselves could take their print home.
Give a subject years. His books on a prison, a mental hospital and a home for old people took about ten years, roughly three for each.
Try this: choose one café, club or meeting place you already visit. Go back again and again for a few months, and get to know the people before you photograph much. At the end, print the pictures and give them to the people in them.
Gear
Petersen says little about the cameras of his early years. The one he names in recent interviews is a small compact.
Contax T3 compact camera: in an interview with British Journal of Photography he said he owns seven of them. He calls them very bad cameras, with focus and light metering he cannot trust, and says that is part of why he likes them. Its small size lets him get very close to people.
Books
Café Lehmitz (Prestel, 2023). The classic first appeared with Schirmer/Mosel in Munich in 1978, after seven publishers had turned it down. This new hardcover edition has 120 pages, a text by Roger Anderson and a new foreword by Tom Waits, who put one of its pictures on the cover of Rain Dogs. Inside are the regulars of a bar on the Reeperbahn, photographed from 1967 to 1970: dancing, kissing, drinking and resting on each other's shoulders. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger called it one of the finest photobooks of the decade. The best book to start with.
City Diary (Steidl, 2012). Three large paperback volumes in a grey cardboard envelope, made with GUN Gallery in Stockholm. They grew out of a City Diary exhibition of 100 pictures from about five years of travel. Portraits and street scenes from many places are mixed together, so the link between them is the photographer himself, not a city. The set won PhotoBook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards in 2012. A good book for anyone who keeps a photographic diary.
From Back Home (Max Ström, 2009). A joint book with JH Engström, who once worked as his assistant. Both men have roots in Värmland, a quiet rural province in western Sweden, and went back there for this project. Petersen's half comes first: friends, family, lovers and details of the land, in hard black and white, moving from birth to death. Engström's half adds colour, flash portraits and collages. The book has 320 pages and won the Contemporary Book Award at the Rencontres d'Arles in 2009.
Soho (MACK, 2012). In 2011 The Photographers' Gallery in London invited Petersen to spend four weeks photographing Soho, as part of a series of commissions supported by Bloomberg. The result shows the street life, pubs, cafés and private homes of the people who live there, in rough, direct black and white. It is a 124-page hardcover with a linen cover and belongs to his City Diary series. A good example of how he works in a short, intense stay.
In his words
“I know that, in order to make good photographs, to be at the right distance, I must have one foot in and one foot out.”
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